Earth Toned Static Grass, 2/4/19

The muddy, brownish gray, dead grass shown in this Tolga Erbora photo is one of the most common scenic features of what we do. Unfortunately, there is no commercially available product to represent it.

The image above illustrates perfectly the brownish/gray tone I’ve been trying to replicate with my do-it-yourself static grass dying project. Finally, I think I have it dialed in.

Before we start, we need to make our own neutral brown powdered dye because the Proceon MX Chocolate brown is way to red. For our purposes we’ll call our concoction “Custom Brown”. Since you’ll need a fair amount of it, make a mid-sized batch and put in a canister or ziplock bag. Mix 3 parts Proceon MX “Bright Green” #097 and 2 parts Proceon MX “Chocolate Brown” #119 and set it aside for future use.

Now that we have our batch of “Custom Brown” mixed up, time to get work. Following the dying instructions from previous blogs, put your 3 cups of water in a pan. Dump in 3/16 teaspoons of our “custom brown” in the water as well as 3/32 teaspoon Warm Black Proceon #128. Dump in some Woodland Scenics FS620 4mm Straw colored static grass and dye as per previous blogs and let dry. It should be a soft nutmeg color.

Once that’s done, take the nutmeg colored static grass, put some in a plastic yogurt cup and pour in an India Ink wash of 1 tsp ink/pint of alcohol. Let dry. That’s it! It should look like what you see in the photo above.